TOKYO — When Makiko Fukui began working in the securities industry in the mid-1990s, she was one of the few women at her firm.

Despite an economics degree from a top university, she was placed on a non-career path, with few opportunities for advancement and a clear understanding that her job depended on remaining single and without children. She left and never went back.

These days, conservative Prime Minister Shinzo Abe wants women like Fukui to keep to their careers.

His government is proposing to help expand child care and is pressing Japanese corporations to allow as many as three years of maternity leave so women have jobs waiting for them when their children become toddlers.

Abe has also instructed government ministries to boost female workers and managers to 30% by 2020 — all of which he believes is an answer to Japan's longtime economic slump.

"It's very clear that this is the only way out for the Japanese economy, but there hasn't been much improvement," says Fukui, who now runs a recruiting firm specializing in female managers.

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and his wife, Akie Abe, take pictures of lions at the National Palace in Addis Ababa , Ethiopia, during visit this month.(Photo: Carl De Souza, AFP/Getty Images)

Abe says that removing workplace obstacles faced by women like Fukui is key to reviving Japan's economy, which has remained flat for nearly two decades and in 2010 fell from being the world's second largest economy to third behind China.

"Enhancing opportunities for women to work and to be active in society is no longer a matter of choice for Japan. It is instead a matter of the greatest urgency," Abe said recently, and reiterated Tuesday while traveling in in Africa.

"Abenomics will not succeed without Womenomics," he said.

Japan has one of the lowest rates of women in management and leadership of any developed country. Women make up 42% of the workforce, but only 11% of managers.

That compares with 47% and 43%, respectively, in the United States, according to Japan's 2013 Gender White Paper. Overall, the World Economic Forum ranks Japan just 105th in gender equality.

The issue has ramifications beyond fairness. Japan's population is aging, the workforce is shrinking and barriers to immigration are high. A Goldman Sachs report predicts that increased participation of women in the workforce could boost Japan's economy by 15%.

Abe says he wants to ensure an availability of an added 400,000 child care spots for children by 2017 and he has pledged to spend $3 billion to improve gender equality at home and abroad. He made history in November when he appointed a woman, Makiko Yamada, to the post of assistant vice minister of economy, trade and industry. It was the first time a Japanese prime minster named a woman to a secretarial post.

But Abe's ruling Liberal Democratic Party has introduced no legislation in either the regular or special sessions of the Diet in 2013 to strengthen labor or equal-opportunity laws. The party has also not proposed to ease tax or pension benefits for women who do not work, or encourage changes in pay or promotion policies that reward seniority and penalize parental leave.

Nor has business seemed to embrace the issue.

In a speech in April, Abe urged members of Japan's three major business associations to set a goal of appointing at least one female executive at each company. As of last week, Abe's office says it knows of no companies that followed through on his request.

None of that is surprising, says Kumiko Nemoto, an associate professor of sociology at Western Kentucky University.

"Abe is not serious. He's saying what is necessary for Japan's international reputation, but he's not proposing any concrete policies that would change anything," Nemoto says.

"The business community is dominated by conservative, older men who don't want to let go of their privileges," says Nemoto, a graduate of Tokyo's Hitotsubashi University, who has closely studied women's workplace issues in Japan.

But one reason women have it tougher in Japan is because there are fewer openings due to cultural differences. Unlike Western countries, Japan workers tend to stick with one company for life.

When women take time off to have children, they find fewer openings when they decide to return to job market because Japanese workers are not moving about creating vacancies to a high degree. In Japan, 60% of working women quit after their first child is born, according to government data.

Fukui, who worked in New York before returning to Japan, says the picture is not entirely bleak. About two years ago, her firm began receiving requests from small- and medium-sized firms looking to hire woman managers.

"The small- and mid-sized companies are having trouble finding good, newly graduated men, so they have no choice but to look for women," she said.